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Comment by peeters | Hacker News Reader

It should be noted (since "over Canada" could give the impression of an invasive action, and the article makes no further clarification) that it was Canadian PM Trudeau who gave the order for this object to be shot down, and explicitly authorized US planes to do so if they reached it first.

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I have no desire to vouch for the sibling comment (currently dead), but not being Canadian I was curious about their claim (I don't generally track budget details of other countries, sorry).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?end=2021... - Military spending in current USD

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?end=2... - Military spending as percent of GDP

Trudeau has been the Canadian PM since 2015 (end of year) and other, than 2016 and 2019, military spending has gone up every year. Over his time as PM there has been a net increase in military spending. The biggest jump was $4.5 billion in 2017, from $17.74 billion to $22.27 billion.

It's interesting to see claims targeting a particular politician show up that are so easily shown to be false. What's the point?

I think the point is that the Canadian military has been due for tons and tons of upgrades and needs a lot of new equipment. That goes for the navy, but especially for the airforce. Just maintaining a constant spend (relative to GDP) is not enough when you have tons of 40-50 year old equipment (ships, airplanes, vehicules) all reaching their end of life at the same time. He also slashed some procurement programs (a new F-35 fleet, some ships) very early on that would've turned out to be very, very useful in retrospect.

(I personally don't think we should spend anything but the bare minimum in defense here in Canada, since we obviously depend on our neighbors anyways. But that's the argument for saying that Trudeau neglected the armed forces, as far as I understand it).

The claim was Trudeau had defunded the military. Mismanaged is a different claim. A 25% budget increase in one year is hardly defunding.

One would need more information about the exact chain of events. Did NORAD call (not necessarily an actual telephone call) Trudeau and say "Mr. Prime Minister, we have an unidentified object in this location and we recommend to take it down. What is your decision?", "Here's the object and the following options: shoot, follow, let go. What is your decision?", or "Here's the object. What's your decision?" Yes, Trudeau gave the order, but his judgment was undoubtedly influenced by the substance and the manner of the information provided to him and his advisors. It gets more complicated if Trudeau debated the matter with members of his cabinet, as he almost certainly did.

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